Kalin,

From what I can tell Brad is a great starter, he just needs to hire a great finisher and then he will have himself a very fine company.

(I agree with you but then we do not have all the details, brad only gave us an appetizer - a tease if you will)

I think most folks are more concerned with what is being done now and fixed/balanced patched now?  (ok maybe not most folks but I am)

Brad,

Thanks for the update its neat I really mean that those are some neat ideas, but until you get the past neat ideas finished, those new neat ideas do not hold water for me.  I like the improvements that 1.08 brought out (Strong EXCEPTION - Kingdom side weapon tech MACE/WARHAMMER).  The AI needs more improvement and you've acknoledged that.  What about making the weapon techs make sense?  No acknowledgement or explanation for why it is the way it is now.

Robert H. has some sharp ideas too that seem kind of straightforward to implement.  Be sure to check those out.

Regards,

Gene

That's a pretty entitled attitude to make. My suggestion in the future would be to wait for a demo. That's what I tend to do. I can only say that we're doing our best to make sure people enjoy their purchase.

We released two expansions for Sins of a Solar Empire which were $10 apiece. The idea behind an expansion vs. a patch is that an expansion adds or changes a core game mechanic (Starbases in Sins: Entrenchment and Diplomacy in Sins: Diplomacy).  It has nothing to do with the quantity of the content being added but rather the scope of the change.

so essentially you are saying waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

yes! yes! yes! this will be awesome! please make this happen!

Age of Wonders . . .

Let me tell you something son.  I have all three interations of the games and I love all of them.  LOVE THEM.  The way Brad and the crew here talked, however, it made me believe I was getting all the glorious goodness of Age of Wonders, on Steroids with the usual Stardock attention to detail and customer satisfaction.  Sadly, that's not the case.

As to how magic was done in all the AoW games . . . Are we talking a mana pool, which disappears turn to turn and refers to the limit that a channeler can cast per turn, or a mana bank, which stores the mana in the form of crystals (a la Age of Wonders . . . hey, wait . . . crystals saving mana?  Where have I seen that recently?).  The heroes in AoW added a set amount each turn to the bank; their own mana pool was limited by spell casting level, not a fluctuating pool that increased dependent on a stat level.

Perhaps if the change in the magic system were concretely and fully explained and remained internally consistent  as well as showed some creative chops, I might jump on board, but the recent changes leave me doubtful.  I know some of you like them, but I don't.  Having lived through the disaster that was Masters of Orion III, the perfect way to kill a franchise, I'm feeling a bitter sense of deja-vu, I'm skeptical.  And yes, I am putting this game away until somehow, some way, it becomes fun.  Yes, I will play AoW 2.  It still remains fun after 8+ years, and the original, nearly 11 years old, is still a good time on my dedicated Win 98 SE machine!

I have AOW 2 and SM as well infact my boys 8/9 are playing them on another computer and I had intended that all 3 of us next year or two might play EWoM on our Home LAN, but ...  We may have to settle for doing that with AOWII:SM instead it all depends on how Single player turns out first...  Given the limitations on MP and the scope but first I must be convinced that the game is complete and we are nearly there but not yet. 

The problem that TBS games have in MP is ppl dropping as soon as they think they lost equality or the upperhand and the games turn into a scientific method optimized early game and whoever comes out on top in the early game then others drop or the game takes too long and I just do not see it going over well with randoms... But close Friends and family well then maybe MP adds real value, but it must be balanced from the start.  Of course dad taking on a couple of preteens might not be the fairest either ;P 

Please, if you ever felt I was trying to dissuade you from playing AoW, that was not my intention. I loved the last 2 games too. The first one was plainly stupid (kill sovereign, kill faction, now WHERE have I seen that recently... :p).

What I was trying to say is that those games had:

1) A global mana pool. Heroes didn't add to that, their pool was just the limit of their spellcasting per turn, it still took mana from the global pool. Introducing one in Elemental is hardly "stupid" imho.

2) AoW :SM is the 3rd of the serie, Elemental is the first game using these concepts and Engine.

So, please, I'm too totally disappointed in the state of the game. But I recognize SD is willing to make it better and also that the amount of work needed will require lot of changes, wich, in the end, will produce something that is hardly "visible" (say "predictable") at the moment.

I'll just give Mr Bradwell credit for his previous games (and no, I do not own GalCiv nor I ever liked it, but I admit it is a STRONG game) and let him work a few months on this. Then I'll either hate or love this game.

Edit: also, I'm 30, hardly your son since my dad is 66... Are you 66?

My god, get over yourself.  All these posts like this you keep putting all over the place help noone.  The fact you bought it from amazon is not any ones fualt but your own(you know you can be at fault right?) 

Next time wait for a demo...I'm just hoping that you left a bit in your bank account to afford some food as well...;)

When do we get to have modding??!  You know - useable modding built in to the game, not a less than half functional map editor where you can't actually edit the details of triggers or restrictions, and can't add the carefully crafted tiles you've saved or...  and not the cryptic 'start it in the editor, then add details in raw XML' that appears to be the current method - and presumably even that is not complete since I've not seen any mods released except for simple maps.  I did look at some of the XML files - and they DEFINITELY need a editor to be useable.

Still enjoy playing the game though - and it is definitely improving!  I look forward to the ongoing developments, and THANK YOU Stardock, and thank you Frogboy for giving us some hints and a rough timeline!

While I'm of the attitude of "I'll like it if it's good, I don't care what you call it"

I think you'd be better off calling them mini-expansions.  People have an expectation with expansions- and I think it will be difficult to deliver what people would consider 2 XP's of material in the 6-month timeframe you gave.  A mini-XP, like what you called the Sins XP, would have more reasonable expectations.  One of the reasons you guys caught so much flack was the expectations for Elemental, including my own, were insane.

Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised.

On the people specialists, how about Civ 4-style slots which buildings can grant.  A farm can generate 1 farmer, A study can generate one scholar, an arcane lab one sage, etc.

Another idea would be to expand the number of notable NPCs, and allow them to level up their bonuses?

My concerns with your idea are can the AI handle, and would it be too much  micromanagement, especially in high lvl cities that get over 1000 pop- that's 100 specialists right now- could be a micro nightmare.

What could we get for a $20 expansion?

I think that's where the disconnect is.  When I hear "expansion", I'm expecting more content in addition to gameplay changes.

A good analogy... you're probably talking Civ IV Warlords when I'm wanting to hear about Civ IV Beyond the Sword.

Expansion... DLC... patch... the lines are blurry i don't think its any form of trickery or false advertising to call something an expansion if its not a huge amount of new content. In the end you will decide to buy it based on 2 things: Price and Content. Unless you are a casual gamer in which case you will go "oooo shiny! gimme gimme!" Are you seriously going to boycott the expansion because of what the devs call it?

Anyways after I play the demo I will probably buy the game before oct 31... here's to waiting patiently!

FROGBOY: Please arrange for more cool spell effects to be added to the game. Modders can make 100's of awesome spells but who wants to see the same effect used over and over again.

That's one really nice moddable thing that I hope becomes active and publishable in near-term upgrades: particle effects!  The button is there in the workshop area, but it is another mod type that is not yet available.

So long as you fix

1.  Out of Memory CTD error.

2.  End Turn stops working hundreds of turns into a game issue

3. Annoying towns renaming themselves to enemy towns names between turns

Anything else after those is a bonus

I have to echo the feeling of this all feeling a bit rushed, I was expecting 1.1 to fix gameplay in the core game (magic/tactical battles) and then allow a little time for balancing and then each expansion to add something brand new (like forging items which has been mentioned in the past). 

It just worries me when all of these blur together, because frankly, the game isn't balanced now, the AI doesn't work now so how can I or any other player have confidence it will with such rushed "expansions".

The fact that we'll have to wait until after expansion 1 for a game that should have been the one on sale makes it a bit disingenious to call it an expansion and not a patch .

People.

The 1st "expansion" won't add content nor make the game deeper. It'll just be an attempt to make it into a working game (by changing things that have been universally reviewed as broken).

It is to be developed in a month.

It is a PATCH.

I remember some of Brad's promises about this which I'll have to dig up and make a final post about when I have some more time.

It's really a sad conclusion for my whole experience with Stardock.

I like reading that you intended for less cities.

I'd really like it if in the sandbox mode there was a tick box or two that allowed for limiting either cities, or in some way limit city building sprawl.

Like tick "limit cities" and it would scale per map size, Tiny = 2=3 cities, Small = 4-5, etc.

Or some other clever way of making the game less city management, more roaming a map, questing, and slaying enemy empires.

Well first off I just want to say thank you for continuing to work on this game and improve it.  There are a lot of game publishers / developers out there who don't even put out two patches, let alone rework the game after release.  Speaking as a strategy game novice, one of the things that would be nice for Elemental is for some form of guidance in the form of feedback.

For example, a setting that can be enabled or disenabled depending on player preferance, that warns the play if they are about to send their economy into negative mode. The number of times, I've been floating alone, seemly going fine, only to have my economy start losing money then after hovering over the coin resource counter to learn that I'm losing -2.8 gilder per turn, are numerious.  What's frustrating is I have no idea what's tanking my econ, or how to fix it, or prevent it from happening in the first place.  An 'danger Will Robertson' message when you decide to build a unit, or construct a building, etc, that would tank your econ would be very helpful for those of us who are strategically challenged ;p.

Another area that could use some improvement is the UI.  It took me ages how to figure out how to exit a city, and even longer to work out that how to get groups to exit a city, and I'm still kinda unsure how to get unit's to exit a ship or transport.  It would be nice, if the UI somehow detected you were trying to do a common task, (like exiting) and gave you some tips as to how to do that.

Lastly it would be nice if there was at least one of each of the common resources (such as metal, gold, materials) in mine form available within reach of a players starting position, or at least the option to have them made available.  The first two games I played after the campaign, I lost due to lack of resources, which the opposing AI had.  The third game, those resources were available, and things went a lot more smoothly, until the game crashed to desktop with an out of memory error.  Still that's what autosaves are for .

Sorry for the rambling post, and thanks once again for all the hard work you are putting into fixing up this game.